Eliot's Spinoza: Realism, affect, and ethics
Item
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Title
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Eliot's Spinoza: Realism, affect, and ethics
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:6a84beda5bdd:11722
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identifier
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12348
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Creator
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Arnett, James J.,
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Contributor
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Peter Hitchcock
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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English literature | Ethics | Comparative literature | affect | Baruch Spinoza | George Eliot | Middlemarch | realism
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Abstract
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In this dissertation, the intersection of the affective-ethical philosophy of Spinoza and the realism of the nineteenth-century British novelist George Eliot are mapped. Eliot was the first translator of Spinoza---though her translations were never published---and few scholars have worked out the ways in which her novels are steeped in his philosophy. This dissertation seeks to make an intervention first in the fields of Victorian literature and realism, but also in the developing field of affect studies, and contributes to interdisciplinary conversations about the confluence of literature and philosophy. The expansive introduction of the dissertation looks closely at the philosophical translations that occupied Eliot in the earliest stages of her career---Strauss, Feuerbach, and Spinoza---and the ways in which these foundational texts congeal into a discourse of philosophical materialism that informed her commitments to literary realism. Chapter 1 analyzes the ways in which Eliot deploys large-scale organic and scientific metaphors in Middlemarch in order to metaphorize Spinoza's concept of immanence, which she deploys in order to emphasize human impingement. Chapter 2 moves to consider Middlemarch's ethos of sympathy as an application of Spinoza's affective ethics. Chapters 3 and 4 proceed to interrogate the role that knowledge and education play in the shaping of an ethical praxis in Daniel Deronda and Felix Holt, the Radical; in the former, knowledge and education is represented in such a way as the means to a Spinozist version of individual freedom, and in the latter, education is seen as the lever by which an interpersonal ethics is transformed into a collective politics. The final two chapters explore the imbrication of kinship, nationalism, and politics in The Spanish Gypsy, Daniel Deronda, and The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, and argue that these three texts represent Eliot's substantial critique of the ethical utility of collective politics as developed by Spinoza in his Political Treatise..
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
